I watched it last night with at Daily Motion. Throughout it all, I kept thinking of how heartbreaking it might have been if they had cast Shirley Booth as Leona. She would have made a great deal more sense of it all. Hepburn was hardly believable as a midwesterner (too much the forthright Yankee,) nor as a secretary (better as an anthropologist leading a dig in Luxor.) Nor could I imagine her ever stepping foot in Akron, Ohio. From the moment she harangued that old man on the train into Venice, I knew she was going to be an odd fit. She just doesn't know the midwest. She played that exchange as anyone but a midwesterner. If she talked like that to anyone in an office in Akron, Ohio, in the 1950's, she would have been tossed out on her ass. It did at least give us a reason for why she was unmarried. But from the outset, we need more 'Little Sheba' and less 'Philadelphia Story.'
She went on to give it a skillful performance, but she was much too flinty and peevish. Those tendencies consigned poor miscast Rossano Brazzi to struggle to make sense of his role. He was nine years younger than Hepburn and looked every day of it. Perhaps it worked in 1955, but in these more cynical times, I kept waiting for this stud to kill her or take her money. But he turned out not to be a variation of the gigolos in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. As presented in Summertime, Renato is just a nice, but horny, Italian man diligently on the make for this crabby older woman. That makes no sense. Casting a much hotter, much younger, Italian man really confused things. One wonders what is wrong with his wife that she let this hot piece get out the door. Too many kids? We don't know. His character would have benefited if more of that was fleshed out in a fuller discussion. One sentence of dialogue doesn't do justice to that back story. 38 years old, all those kids, separated from his wife, chasing a woman pushing 50... perhaps it is just too much to explain. In any event, Brazzi trying so diligently to get into Hepburn's pants is weird.
Despite neither being well cast, but had some fine moments. Hepburn really did drum up a bit of vulnerability, not at all her brand. Brazzi was dependably tempting. The whole thing is such a piece from its moment of history, a gay writer (Arthur Laurents) sublimating his own socially forbidden sexuality into the character of a repressed woman. No one must see her romantic activities, so she crosses the ocean to a place where she is unknown to dare the romantic freedom that must not be dared in Akron. When confronted with sex, she resists, succumbs to it, then cuts it off, denying herself happiness and embracing conformity and the social norm. Self-preservation, but she cannot have love. Somehow, this movie tries to make it seem that she made the right choice. Ugh. There is a third way between hopping the train back to Akron and inviting the gigolo up into your boudoir to kill you. We've all been fighting for that balance most of our lives. I didn't enjoy watching Hepburn and Lean and Hollywood tell me to forget about it, you can't be happy. You have to stay in Akron, even if it kills you. She ended her trip early and went back to Akron. She could have gone to Rome. Or Paris. Or Florence. That's just a few hours away. But no. End... It... All! The casting of a super hot younger Italian man as Renato really underscores all of this. Hollywood will always overlook problems if someone is photogenic.
Below is Shirley Booth and Dino Di Luca from the Broadway production. It makes a huge difference to have an older Italian gentleman who we think is also looking for a moment of happiness.
The most interesting thing about this film is the use of Technicolor on location in post-war Venice. How many fuses did they blow doing that? How many delays as the Venetian infrastructure was taxed by all those lighting units?
